The foreshore south of Toondah Harbour is home for many migratory shorebirds
On World Wetlands Day 2018 Redlands2030 is publishing the full version of a speech prepared by Reverend Douglas Jones for the Welcome Back Shorebirds event held recently.
Rev. Douglas Jones
Rev. Jones says that we must all become questioning carers to protect our common home including our environment and its inhabitants such as the migratory shorebirds which spend an important amount of time each year feeding on the Toondah wetlands.
If you want to help protect the Toondah wetlands please consider writing a letter to the Queensland Premier and her ministers.
Details including a template letter are available in this post:
Premier, please protect the Toondah wetlands
A man’s home is his castle
A man’s home is his castle
Many of you here today probably saw the Australian movie, The Castle. The “Castle” is the Kerrigan family home in the outer Melbourne blue-collar suburb of Coolaroo, a home filled with love as well as pride in the family’s modest lifestyle. The house is built in a largely undeveloped housing tract, on a toxic landfill, and directly adjacent to an airport runway. Despite all this, sweet-natured family patriarch Darryl Kerrigan believes that he lives in the lap of luxury.
The Kerrigan world is thrown into a spin one day, when a property valuer arrives to inspect the house. Darryl points out all the features of the property, believing they’ll add value to the appraisal, even though he has no wish to sell. A few weeks later, he receives a letter informing him of the compulsory acquisition of his house for the sum of $70,000.
Darryl believes that the government cannot evict him unwillingly from his treasured home, so he attempts to fight the eviction. His initial attempt in court is unsuccessful and the family is given two weeks’ notice to vacate. Things looks bleak until a retired QC, Lawrence Hamill, offers to take the case in the High Court gratis. Hamill successfully argues before the High Court that the eviction order is unjust.
The film’s title draws on the English saying, repeatedly referred to in the film, “a man’s home is his castle“. That saying is attributed to the great English jurist of the 16th and 17th Centuries, Sir Edward Coke (pronounced Cook), who was Attorney General for England and Wales (1594-1606) and then Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, the equivalent of our High Court (1613-1616). This is what Coke said:
“An Englishman’s house is as his castle, and each man’s home his safest refuge.
On Care for our Common Home
Pope Francis
On the 18th June, 2015, Pope Francis released an encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.
Deliberately referring to the example of, and drawing inspiration from, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Ecology, Pope Francis addressed his encyclical, not only to Catholics but to “every living person on this planet.”
He called for a much greater awareness that the earth we share with all other creatures is our common home and we ought therefore to care for it in such a way that all may prosper, not in the monetary sense but in the well-being sense.
What we look out on as we look out at these mudflats and the mangroves here at Toondah Harbour is the summer home of some of the most remarkable creatures I have ever contemplated.
Since reading the Pope’s encyclical, every morning, as I walk along the foreshore of Moreton Bay, I remind myself that it is the home of shorebird species that have been making annual pilgrimages between Toondah Harbour and Oyster Point and their northern hemisphere breeding grounds for millenia.
What right have I to evict them from their home? What right have any of us to evict them from their home?
This is their “castle”, their “safest refuge” and they must be given a voice in our political system. We are that voice.
The so-called development proposal by Walker Group Holdings in response to the classification of Toondah Harbour precinct as a Priority Development Area (PDA), and the local council’s approval of a previous and much smaller proposal by Walkers, is, in effect, an eviction notice to the many species including migratory shore birds that know this area as their home.
We must be Questioning Carers
Bar-tailed godwit on the foreshore at G.J. Walter Park
We may not be QCs in the legal sense, but we must be QCs in a community and ecological sense. We must be Questioning Carers who appeal to the court of public opinion and question governments – commonwealth, state and local.
Are they honouring the commitments made on behalf of the Australian people to the Ramsar Convention (wetland habitat protection), the Bonn Convention (migratory animals protection) to which Australia is signatory, as well as to our bilateral agreements with Japan (JAMBA), China (CAMBA) and the Republic of Korea (ROKAMBA) aimed at protecting migratory birds? Are our politicians even aware of these?
The Walker Group Holding proposal for the destruction of the Toondah Harbour home of these precious birds has not been given the green light.
Terms of reference for an Environmental Impact Assessment have yet to see the light of day, and given the advice provided to the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Energy, The Hon Josh Frydenberg, by the Department for the Environment and Energy, with all the red lights that it contains about the proposed development, advice with which the Minister has concurred, it is difficult to see how the local Council can publicly state that the project has been given the green light.
To say so is to mislead the local community.
With populations of several migratory birds trending to dangerously low levels, we must ensure that Australian governments, Commonwealth, State and Local, honour these commitments we have made as a nation and protect all their remaining habitat.
Please become QCs, questioning carers for our common home, and challenge the eviction notice that the state and local governments are trying to impose on the voiceless and vulnerable creatures, the Eastern Curlews, the Bar-tailed Godwits and many others, whose home Toondah Harbour is.
I would be so bold as to speak on behalf of these migratory birds, and in the spirit of Saint Francis, ask everyone here to become informed and become involved to care for and protect this common home that we share here so that the eviction notice is dismissed.
Rev. Douglas Jones
Cleveland
Dear Premier will Labor rethink its Toondah plans?
If you want to help protect the Toondah wetlands please consider writing a letter to the Queensland Premier and her ministers.
Details including a template letter are available in this post:
Premier, please protect the Toondah wetlands
Redlands2030 – 2 February 2018
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2 Comments
Well spoken and well argued.
Certainly beats the rhetoric of “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”; “Putting Redlands on the Map”; and the ole “Open for Business”.
How about ….Toondah..”You gotta be joking”
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the gathering on World Wetlands Day last year, so I didn’t hear Doug Jones deliver this wonderful speech. What a brilliant statement! Of course we are all concerned about the destruction of Toondah Harbour and the ruining of the wonderful view and public space at G J Walter Park, but Doug’s focus on the eviction of the endangered birdlife is sobering.